Hotspot Shield’s New Expansion: Protecting MENA from attacks and hacking

On Rocky Bytes, we like Hotspot Shield. We’ve featured it more in our comparison battles between the different censorship circumvention tools in our article: Best internet privacy and anti-censorship tools: Tor, Hotspot Shield and Ultrasurf. It’s one of the most prominent tools for ensuring free web browsing and online privacy. If you want to try this award winning application for yourself, then here is Hotspot Shield free download.

It gained fame during the Arab Spring protests of 2010, during which protesters used the Hotspot VPNs to upload images and videos of the events. Later on, during the Egyptian protests and revolution of 2011, it once again was the tool of choice to circumvent censorship put in place by the Mubarak regime on social and international media. Its latest moment of popular fame was in 2013, when the application’s VPN Network was instrumental in helping the people of Turkey overcome the government’s suspected attempts at censoring international websites and social media. This allowed them continued access to their social media profiles and any website they wanted to access, without fear of being blocked by the censorship attempts.

Now, in 2014, and according to the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology at the Qatar ICT Conference and Exhibition (QITCOM), the people of the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) are terrified about having their online privacy invaded and their various accounts hacked or attacked. A study by the Ministry also revealed that while half the population is careful online, only a minority make sure to scan their devices for viruses and avoid downloading applications and documents from people they don’t know.

So, in looking for help, they have turned to Hotspot Shield for the answer and AnchorFree is delivering. On July 16 this year, they announced they would be expanding their award-winning application to Nokia X mobiles. These are the go-to Android devices of the region.

Knowing how important internet security and privacy are, AnchorFree is commited to helping the people living in MENA ensure their privacy and their freedom to navigate the web and access the content they need to without having to worry about their information being compromised.

The mobile application of Hotspot shield, now offered on the Nokia X mobiles in MENA, offers the following features:

• It secures mobile and public Wi-Fi connections with HTTPS encryption.
• It prevents hackers from stealing the user’s private information.
• It enables private and anonymous web access, to circumvent censorship mechanisms or unjust reprisals.
• It protects the users from malicious websites by blocking malware from them, thanks to Hotspot Shield’s 3.5 million suspect website database.

In addition to these, the application also compresses internet data. All over the world, the application saved users over 220 million megabytes of data usage in 2013.

AnchorFree has always been committed to helping those under heavy censorship, but I believe this isn’t a purely altruistic move either. Nearly half of Hotspot’s monthly activity comes from their mobile application, so it makes sense to extend the compatibility of this application to the aforementioned Nokia devices.

Sound off in the comments with your opinions!